Prologue
March: The One Where Elsa and Anna Send a Lot of Letters
April: The One Where Elsa is the Snowman NO WAIT HEAR ME OUT
May: The One Where The Snow Queen Isn't Elsa. Also, Lesbians.
June: I Go It Old School, Take Two
July: A Wild Kristoff Appears
August: The One Where Elsa is an Accidental Kidnapper
September: The One With the Curse
As you may have noticed, dear readers, I am all about reusing themes from previous months in slightly different ways. Innovation is not the be-all end-all of creativity, here. I mean, I'm not in the "there are only really two stories in the world" camp, because that seems a bit... delusional (I mean, even if you're saying there are only two genres in the world, action and romance, you're missing out on things like the classic literary genre of "white dudes doing exactly nothing and then, presumably, dying eventually," which I have been informed is very important to people who are not me) but many glorious things have come out of people reworking and reinterpreting tropes and story elements with a long, long history behind them.
tl;dr look whatever this just has some stuff in it that didn't make sense in last month's version so I gave it its own month, okay.
[Edit: Okay, I SWEAR I meant to do this before the last day of the month. I started it like a week ago and everything. And yet! Somehow here we are again. Alas.]
[Edit 2: Also, then Halloween happened. Specifically, Halloweentown 2 and the fact that I had to drag myself out to Brooklyn. In case you're curious, although this was planned beforehand, most of it was written on the 2 train, which I guess is one argument for long commutes.]
[Not an edit but just so you know, this is the ROM-COM-IEST THING I HAVE EVER WRITTEN.]
THIS MONTH we start with one of my classic faves: the unreliable storyteller beginning! In this case it is Anna telling the tale of Elsa's Mysterious Curse to some small child. That's right, Elsa's Mysterious Curse is back! Sort of. Anyway, we get the whole "voiceover while pretty story with pretty art plays out for us" — it doesn't really matter what the details of the story are, as long as it's A) wrong and B) seems appropriately fairy-tale-y. Or partially wrong, at least. The facts of the matter are that Elsa was young, she seriously needed some me-time, and so she decided to go into the mountains for the day. Anna can embellish beyond that.
Just as we get to the bit about some evildoer cursing a young Elsa to feel nothing but ice and cold forever, and Elsa valiantly deflecting part of the curse before passing out and unconsciously surfing home on a wave of frost, which is where her worried parents find her — or something to that extent, anyway — the king and queen come along and scold her for telling tall tales. After all, nobody knows that happened in the mountains that day, not even Elsa; maybe she hit her head and the memories are fuzzy or something. And then when she woke up and started getting nervous...
Anyway, K&Q don't want Anna telling stories, although Anna (~16) protests that in her defense, ever since their parents declared open season on Elsa, everyone's been telling tales, and at least hers are interesting.
"It's not open season!" they protest.
Anna is dubious. "That's not what Elsa says."
"Where is she, anyway? We've been looking for her all over."
"Where do you think?"
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| Those commute-notes were intense. |
They want her to emerge to come meet some more princes who've been invited to visit. "Did you know," Elsa says, "that the earliest records of frog princes indicate that the princess may have turned him back by throwing him against a wall?"
"Nobody's throwing you against a wall, sweetheart."
Which wasn't really Elsa's point, but whatever. It's an obviously well-worn argument with several dimensions and iterations, and we'll hear much more on Elsa's thoughts about this "true love" and curse-breaking stuff throughout the story; she's done a lot of research into legends and has a lot of arguments prepared about the fallacy of the idea of true love and the ways in which people are expected to fall in love.
Her parents mostly sigh and point to the ice-spikes that have grown anew. "Elsa. What if you hurt someone again?"
Elsa crosses her arms and lifts her chin. "I'm working on it!"
But they're insistent, and we start to get the picture: this parade of princes is all part of the king and queen's hope that Elsa will find true love and break her curse. It's a little like the Bachelorette, except with magic, and also the fact that Elsa doesn't actually want to break the curse. She's not opposed to falling in love, in theory, but she's never felt very... cursed. She likes the ice, she likes never being cold, she likes being able to ice skate whenever she wants, she loves freaking out her sister with her freezing cold toes, she likes being able to force people to stay at a distance if she wants them to. It makes her feel safe. It's just that it all comes so much more easily when she's alone. When she's around, things sometimes going slightly awry.
She doesn't even really believe in the concept of true love — she and Anna probably have some discussions about this — just because it seems like such a nebulous thing. How do you tell if it's true love? Does true love mean that you'll always love each other forever and ever? Anna's kissed her on the cheek plenty of times and that's never done anything, so does platonic love not count? What if people have different opinions on what love is? Do you have to know each other, or does it just mean that you're suited for it, and in that case who's doing the deciding? Why does this seem to happen so often to royalty? Also, her research has told her that "true love's kiss" isn't nearly as common of a solution as people assume it is. So yeah, get ready for some meta-as-hell discussions through the course of this movie!
But just in case breaking the curse requires some form of romantic attachment and/or a kiss from a prince, she's not going to risk it.
(In case anyone was curious, Anna never wants to fall in love. Ever. She's willing to get married, if she has to for the sake of the country or whatever, but she plans on them just being really good friends instead. Does she have a few conversations with people who insist that she'll change her mind when she gets older? Maybe. Do these conversations change anything? Nope.)
Buuuuut her parents don't think that there's such a thing as a good curse, ergo we get the True Love Challenge. In service of them trying to find her a Fairy Tale Romance, they're going for alllllll the Disney-style falling-in-love classics. There are lots of balls. SO MANY balls, all with musicians just waiting to strike up a tune if Elsa ever gets the urge to duet.
Hans is there, too! He's not... evil, but he's hella entitled. You know, the handsome, rich, white boy who thinks that just because he's handsome and rich and charming, that he should get things. And he's persistent, and so many people at court think that Elsa should fall in love with him. Maybe he even manages to coax her into a very, very reluctant duet at one point, where Elsa is getting prodded by her parents through the whole thing.
Hans: The Man Who Thinks He's All That! Because you don't have to be Gaston-levels of "put your dad in the loonybin and try to kill your hairy boyfriend" to be a person who needs to freaking learn the meaning of the word "no."
Kristoff is also there, except she's Krista, now. She's a princess of the mountain kingdom; she and Elsa have some form of meet-cute, possibly one that involves Elsa literally tripping over her, and Kris explains that she's beginning to think she only got invited because Elsa's parents hadn't heard that she went from being a prince to being a princess. Now that she's here, of course, they'd never be so rude as to rescind their invitation.
Elsa likes girls as well, but she's never really brought it up with their parents; she's never planning to fall in love anyway, and she didn't want to seem like she was encouraging their lunacy. Plus, theoretically there's only a finite number of princes, hopefully they'll all wander off soon enough.
Kris, having been duly warned that Elsa will never love her, ends up helping Elsa to wiggle out of the True Love Challenges. Anna conspires with them, too. They sneak her out of the tall tower, hep her avoid the sleeping spells, and generally run interference when she's being pursued or wooed or whatever. I am skimming over this part in a paragraph, but it is a decent chunk of the movie! Also, it is ROM COM CITY. FULL OF CUTE SHENANIGANS. THE ROMMIEST OF COMMIESTS.
When they're not doing that, they talk. Kris is from a mountain kingdom not far from where Elsa ran the day that she got cursed, and Elsa's never been back. She's still a little unnerved by it, to be honest; some days she doesn't even like leaving the palace/village. She lost a day of her life there and she doesn't even know how. She wakes up gasping from dreams about it sometimes.
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| eric schwartz on flickr, "ominous mountains in fog" |
It turns out, though, that despite telling herself not to, Kris has sort of been accidentally falling in love with Elsa this whole time — and Elsa, despite herself, sort of returns the feeling, but refuses to let herself do anything about it because she's so worried about becoming uncursed. It's entirely possible that there is some frustration on both sides about this.
So Kris — who is sweet and enthusiastic and hella stubborn — ends up going back into the mountains to find out more about the curse. They know more about magic in the mountains; the trolls live there, and the yetis, and various other magic-users. Elsa's just been too freaked out by the mountains to go in search of information.
If the curse is about romantic love, and Elsa's too worried about it for them to date, then Kris will back off, but since Elsa likes her back, isn't it worth trying to find out if they have a shot? Aren't good things sometimes worth fighting for?
Off she goes into the mountains, and Elsa is worried but stubborn until Entitled Hans makes some sort of comment about how Kris is probably going to die or give up or something, at which point Elsa becomes so worried that she runs out the door. She doesn't have to worry about the cold, after all, and she'd rather have Kris in her life and not know — and, maybe, risk accidentally breaking the curse? — than the other way around.
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| 8 og on flickr, "untitled," Tanzawa Mountains, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan |
Don't ask me how that happens. It's 1 am.
"Elsa!" Kris says happily, when Elsa reaches the troll camp slung over the shoulder of one of the trolls. "You found the trolls!"
Cue the happy reunion, along with an explanation. It's not a curse; it's a gift, from the trolls. (Also, they are dubious about the idea that kissing someone will break a curse in the first place. Elsa is overjoyed.) It's a gift of strength and protection from the trolls, partially from the troll queen to another queen-to-be, and partially because when she was here as a kid she helped save some of the smaller trolls from some dangerous situation. This is the alarming bit that she's been dreaming about, and it's also why she can't remember that day; in the process, she hit her head.
Before that, though, when she and the trolls were talking they discovered they had a lot in common. Like Elsa, the trolls need a lot of solitary time; it's why they live out in the middle of the mountains, and they all have caves where they can go just to be alone. Elsa didn't have a place like that, and as princess, there were already a lot of people-demands on her. The powers were meant to help, and to help forge bonds between their kingdoms.
Unfortunately, Elsa really did lose consciousness and surf home on a wave of frost. Maybe there was a secondary rockslide or something and she got caught in it, and her new powers helped her escape mostly unscathed? The trolls couldn't go looking for her, because they had a really hard time leaving the mountain, so they had to hope that she would come back — except, being freaked out and not remembering anything, she never came into the mountains again. (They're not being assholes; they knew she'd been found, and they didn't know she'd been hit on the head.)
But now she's here, and her scary chase through the mountains is over, and she and Kris can kiss! Yay!! Also, she and the trolls can discuss various academic interpretations of older myths and legends! There is nothing bad here!
Hans, Anna, and the king and queen have ridden after them. Elsa and Kris meet them at the base of the mountain. Hans is an ass, but someone yells at him, as well someone should. Elsa tells her parents that if they're still worried about her hurting someone with her powers, they don't need to be; they've had enough people visiting her kingdom, and now it's her turn to go visit someone else's. She's going to stay with Kris in the mountains and learn with the trolls for a little while, and maybe she and Kris are too new to each other to know if they're in "love", and maybe it'll happen and maybe it won't, and maybe this concept of true love is legit or maybe it's bullshit, and maybe it'll last or maybe it won't, but. It'll be kind of cool finding out, Elsa thinks.
They all live happily ever after, of course.
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